Josh Cheuse

When you were doing these shots, were you just capturing moments?

Or did you have this sense of history and documenting something that you felt was important? I knew something was happening, and I’m not a musical person, so the camera was my tool to pick up and get involved in the scene. It’s almost like the punk- rock ethos. I was this punk kid in New York—I wasn’t in London, I missed punk rock, so hip-hop was kind of my punk rock. Hanging out with Mike and Adam and Adam [a.k.a. the Beastie Boys], we just knew that something was kicking off. We used to go to Queens, hang out with those guys or whatever. I can’t say at the time I knew it was going to be culturally significant 20 years later. All I really knew was it was exciting, it was fun, I was working with my friends, I was doing something I love to do and it felt good. I didn’t know it was history—I didn’t even know what “history” was, in a way.

Did you have any training with a camera?

I never really knew much about technique except what I learned in junior high school at the time, because I was in school and was just sneaking off to do these things. I was reading today about Robert Frank, who’s like my “God”; he was this amazing photographer from Switzerland who came here when he was 22, and he went across America and just shot pictures with his black-and-white film. It was something like that. Specifically him and then a few other photographers in London—like Pennie Smith, who was working with the Clash and people like that—inspired me to pick up the camera, throw the black-and-white film in there and not worry so much about the technique or the lighting at the moment. It was more about the feeling.

Has this changed over the years, or do you proceed with this same ethos?

To this day, it still feels like magic to me, when you send the film into the lab and it’s developed, that there’s an image at all. It’s like a magical thing between the chemicals and the silver and the gelatin and the light and that combination of elements that makes an image. And kind of the spirit of the person somehow is involved in that—it’s alchemy. I wasn’t the greatest in the darkroom as far as my printing, but there was a photographer named David Gahr, he was a real inspiration and mentor, and he used to say to me: “You’re a poet, you’re not a printer.” Now I have a great printer and I stick to the poetry.